As you read here earlier today, a Florida judge removed Amendment 8 off the ballot because the language was confusing and deceptive. The language fails to inform the voter what the purpose and the effect of the proposal is. It was written to mislead voters. Its true purpose was to remove from local school boards the ability to control, supervise, regulate, and manage schools within their district.
Thank God for the Florida League of Women Voters!
I hope you will buy and read Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.
It is ironic that Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, because her book stands in opposition to almost everything Mayor Michael Bloomberg did when he had control of the New York City public schools. Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein believed in carrots and sticks. They believed in stack ranking. They believed that test scores were the be-all and end-all of education. They believed that teachers and principals would be motivated to work harder if their jobs and careers were on the line every day. They created a climate of fear, where people were terminated suddenly and replaced by inexperienced newcomers. If they had brought in W. Edwards Deming—Gabor’s guiding star— as an advisor, their strategies would have been very different.
Gabor is a proponent of the philosophy of management of Deming, the management guru who is widely credited with reviving Japanese industry after World War II, by changing its culture and making it a world leader. If Bloomberg had hired Deming as his lead adviser, his strategies would have been lastting, and he might have really transformed the nation’s largest school system and had a national impact.
I first learned about Deming’s work by reading Gabor’s book about Deming titled The Man Who Discovered Quality. I read the book in 2012. I have repeatedly gone back to re-read chapter 9, the chapter where she explains Deming’s hostility to merit pay and performance rankings and his emphasis on collaboration and teamwork.
Describing his views, she wrote:
“The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics…It is unfair as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be totally caused by the system that they work in.”
She wrote, citing Deming, that performance pay (educators call it merit pay) undermines the corporate culture; it gets everyone thinking only about himself and not about the good of the corporation. Everyone focuses on short-term goals, not long-term goals. If the corporation is unsuccessful, Deming said, it is the fault of the system, not the workers in it. It is management’s job to recruit the best workers, to train them well, to support them, and create an environment in which they can take joy in their work.
Deming understood that the carrot-and-stick philosophy was early twentieth century behaviorism. He understood that threats and rewards do not produce genuine improvement in the workplace. He anticipated what twenty-first century psychologists like Edward Deci and Dan Ariely have demonstrated with their social experiments: People are motivated not by incentives and fear, but by idealism, by a sense of purpose, and by professional autonomy, the freedom to do one’s job well.
In After the Education Wars, Gabor takes her Demingite perspective and writes case studies of districts that have figured out how to embed his principles.
She writes about the “small schools movement” in New York City, the one led by Ann Cook and Deborah Meier, which relied on performance assessment, not standardized tests; the remarkable revival of Brockton High School in Massachusetts, a school with more than 4,000 students; the Leander school district in central Texas, which embraced Deming principles; and the charter takeover of New Orleans.
The chapter on New Orleans is the best account that I have read of what happened in that city. It is not about numbers, test scores, graduation rates, and other data, but about what happened to the students and families who live in New Orleans. She describes a hostile corporate takeover of a city’s public schools and a deliberate, calculated, smug effort to destroy democracy. Her overall view is that the free-market reforms were “done to black people, not with black people.” She spends ample time in the schools and describes the best (and the worst) of them. She follows students as they progress through charter schools to college or prison. She pays close attention to the students in need of special education who don’t get it and who suffer the consequences. She takes a close look at the outside money fueling the free-market makeover. She explains the role of the Gates Foundation, New Schools for New Orleans, and other elements of what was essentially hijacking of the entire school system by venture capitalists and foundations who were eager to make a point about their own success as “gatekeepers” of reform. She finds that New Schools for New Orleans “functions more like a cartel than an open-source project.” It prefers “no-excuses” charter schools like KIPP. Gabor is critical of the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University for ignoring the “no-excuses” discipline policies, saying “ignoring no-excuses discipline practices at New Orleans charters is like covering the New England Patriots and ignoring Deflategate…[Douglas] Harris bristles at the suggesting that his research organization is anything but neutral in its assessments of the city’s charters. Yet ERA’s job must be especially difficult given its co-location with NSNO and the Cowen Institute on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street.”
She writes wistfully of a New Orleans story that never was: “a post-Katrina rebuilding–even one premised on a sizable charter sector, albeit with better oversight and coordination of vital services like those for special-needs students–that sought to engage the community in a way that would have helped preserve, even enhance, its stake in their children’s education. What if, instead of raising the performance scores so as to lasso the vast majority of New Orleans charters into the RSD, the city had taken control of the worst schools while encouraging community groups…to lead by example. What if it had made a concerted effort to enlists dedicated, respected educators and involved citizens and parents…in the school-design and chartering process?”
Gabor’s chapter on New Orleans is a masterpiece of journalism and investigative reporting.
She concludes that “Contrary to education-reform dogma, the examples in this book suggest that restoring democracy, participative decision making, and the training needed to make both more effective can be a key to school improvement and to imbuing children–especially poor and minority children–with the possibilities of citizenship and power in a democracy.”
For those of us concerned about the future of public education in America, one of the most important elections this fall is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction between Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond. They are both Democrats, on paper. Thurmond won the overwhelming endorsement of the Democrats, like 89% to 5% at the party’s state convention. The grassroots know who the real Democrat is and who is the puppet of the charter billionaires.
I support Tony Thurmond, a former social worker and current legislator. His first commitment is to children. I will write more about him as the election nears. California needs a State Superintendent whose first priority is meeting the needs of students, not the whims of Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, the Walton family, and Michael Bloomberg.
Marshall Tuck is a former investment banker who went into education via management of charter schools. He has won the hearts and minds of the Uber-rich.
The Republican Party has sent out fliers endorsing Tuck. No surprise. He has received campaign contributions from the Walmart family and the usual array of charter-loving billionaires who want to disrupt public schools.
He is, whether he likes it or not, the candidate of the right.
He pledged not to take money from PACs, but when the Walton heirs bundled money for him, he took it. When a notorious homophobe funded his campaign, he was sufficiently embarrassed to return the money. The rightwingers see him as the Betsy DeVos of California, but his billionaire funders will portray him as a fresh face with innovative ideas, like more charter schools.
As Jim Miller of San Diego wrote,
“The hope of Tuck’s supporters is that perhaps no one will notice. Maybe, they think, the big money will push him over the finish line this time despite the sleazy rightwing connections that would seem an anathema to voters here on the Left Coast. We can only trust that the vast majority California’s Democratic voters will join those Democrats at the state convention last week who rejected Tuck’s second bid to open California schools to the kinds of right-wing privatization schemes that have wreaked havoc elsewhere in the country.”
Jeb Bush has been promoting school choice and disparaging public s hoops for years. Betsy DeVos was a member of the board of his Foundation for Excellence in Education until Trump chose her as Secretary of Education.
Jeb Bush invented the nutty notion of giving a letter grade to schools.
Jeb Bush zealously believes in high-stakes standardized testing and VAM. In Jeb’s Odel, Testing and letter grades are mechanisms to promote privatization.
Who funds his foundation?
The biggest donors in 2017 were Gates, Bloomberg, and Walton, each having given Jeb more than $1 Million for his privatization campaigns.
Tom Torlakson, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction in California, has created a task force to review the charter school laws in the state.
California has more charter schools than any other state. The California Charter School Association is the richest, most powerful lobby in the state and has been able to stymie any overhaul of the law. The CCSA has staunchly opposed any revision of the law that might require accountability or transparency from charter schools and that would, for example, bar conflicts of interest or for-profit charters.
Governor Jerry Brown, who has been a progressive leader on so many major issues, has been a faithful defender of charter schools, vetoing any legislative efforts to update the law.
But, it now appears that the new governor will be Gavin Newsom, and he has no debts to the CCSSA, which directed millions of dollars to Antonio Villairaigosa in the primaries, who ran a distant third.
Given the reshuffling at the top, it is time to fix the conditions that allow frauds and scandals to go undetected in the charter sector.
Responsible members of the charter industry should work diligently to remove the fraudsters and grifters from their sector, as should everyone.
Charters should not have the ability to appeal from the district board to the county board to the state board, where they are certain to win approval, no matter how ill-qualified their staff.
At present, given the lack of any accountability for the expenditure of public money by charters, the state has experienced many scandals. To learn more about the woeful state of California’s charter industry, read Carol Burris’s carefully researched “Charters and Consequences.”
The Torlakson commission has the chance to get the law right, which would benefit both public schools and charter schools.
Valerie Strauss writes about Omarosa’s new book “Unhinged” and what she says about Betsy DeVos.
“A new book about President Trump by one of his former senior advisers, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claims that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants “to replace public education with for-profit schools” and that Trump has called her by the nickname “Ditzy DeVos….”
“Manigault Newman writes:
“Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools. She believes it would be better for students, but the truth is, it’s about profit. She’s so fixated on her agenda, she can’t give any consideration to building our public schools, providing financing for them, particularly their infrastructure needs.
“Manigault Newman writes that she accompanied DeVos on a trip to Florida in 2017 and that DeVos was booed while giving a graduation speech at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Florida. Graduating students heckled DeVos in large part because a few months earlier, she had called historically black colleges and universities — which were created because blacks couldn’t attend white schools — “pioneers” of school choice.
“Manigault Newman writes that after the speech, she asked the secretary how she thought she did. DeVos responded, according to the book, by saying she thought she did “great,” and then is quoted as having said the students at the Bethune-Cookman graduation “don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.” Manigault Newman then wrote this: “Meaning, all those black students were too stupid to understand her agenda.”
Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was created by a group of guys who work as hedge fund managers. Some are Democrats, other are Republicans. They support charter schools and high-stakes testing. They never support public schools. They support Teach for America. They think that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students, even though research overwhelmingly shows that this method is a failure (see the recent RAND-AIR report on the flop of the Gates-funded demonstration of evaluating teachers by test scores). They believe in merit pay, even though merit pay has never worked anywhere. There is no evidence that any active member of DFER ever attended a public school, ever taught in a public school, or ever sent his children to a public school. DFER doesn’t like public schools. Like Betsy DeVos, which it pretends to oppose, DFER believes in free-market reform of schools. If I am wrong, I hope that one of these hedge fund managers contacts me to let me know.
DFER loves corporate charter chains and doesn’t like local democratic control of schools. They see nothing unsavory about out-of-state billionaires buying an election for their favorite candidate, even in a local school board election. DFER is a PAC that collects and distributes fund to candidates who support its goals.
Here is the DFER list for this year’s election. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet are perennial favorites of DFER. I don’t know if Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia is aligned with their philosophy or if DFER is trying to establish a relationship. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee in the Congress. Maybe DFER is currying his favor. His predecessor, Congressman George Miller of California, was fully aligned with DFER’s views and was richly rewarded with fundraisers, even when he didn’t have an opponent. His former chief of staff, Charles Barone, now runs the DFER office in D.C.
Suffice it to say that DFER pays no attention to research that does not support its fervent belief in charters, private management, and high-stakes testing. DFER believes in the free market, punishments and rewards for performance. That works on Wall Street. It should work in schools, even if it doesn’t.
Here is a graphic that shows the links among DFER and unsavory characters who also want to privatize public education. There is a factual error in the graphic. Political money is spent by 501c4 organizations. Those designated as 501c3 are supposed to be non-political. The non-political wing of DFER is called ”Education Reform Now.” It has a political advocacy group called “Education Reform Now Advocacy.” Of course, it advocates for high-stakes testing and charter schools. “Education reform,” in the eyes of those connected to DFER, means replacing public schools with private management that is neither accountable nor transparent.
DFER puts out a list of candidates (all Democrats) and invites its members to send them contributions. In this way, it is able to raise very large sums for friends of charter schools in Congress and in important state races, even school board races. Its mailing list includes many very wealthy people, so DFER is a major source of money for candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, and other charter-friendly Democrats.
The Democratic Party conventions in both California and Colorado denounced DFER for calling itsel “Democrats” when they undermine public schools.
The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.
But now comes a new and welcome voice.
Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.
Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.
She writes:
“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.
“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.
“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.
“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.
“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.
“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.
“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.
“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.
“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.
“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”
“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.
“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.
“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.
“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“
Democracy Prep is leaving the District of Columbia. Its charter school is a failure. Interestingly, Democracy Prep was chosen to take over the Andre Agassi Charter School in Las Vegas after that well-funded school failed.
Charters come, charters go. Kids, go find another school. Tough luck. Better luck next time. Walmart opens and closes stores all the time. What’s the big deal? You know, disruption.
A prominent Southeast Washington charter school with more than 600 students announced Friday that the coming school year will be its last.
Leaders of Democracy Prep Congress Heights said in an email to parents that the school, which has students in preschool through eighth grade, was unable “to provide Congress Heights scholars the school they deserve.”
The letter said Democracy Prep will seek a new organization to run the campus for the 2019-2020 academic year. School leaders said they are confident they will find a new operator and that students will not have to be displaced.
Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter network, made big promises when it entered the District in 2014 to take over Imagine Southeast, which was on the cusp of being shut down over poor performance.
The charter network had built a reputation for lifting test scores among poor children from low-income families in New York’s Harlem neighborhood and promised to bring its model of college prep and civic education to Washington. The network operates nearly 20 schools across the country, and the D.C. school is the only one it is closing.
Palm Beach County is struggling to close down a floundering charter school called Eagle Arts Academy.
Frustrated so far in their attempts to close Eagle Arts Academy, Palm Beach County public school leaders are going for the nuclear option: an immediate shutdown of the troubled Wellington charter school.
Schools Superintendent Donald Fennoy is proposing to close the school this week, arguing that its financial woes and evident lack of a campus or teaching staff make it unsafe for students.
The school’s “fiscal mismanagement and deteriorating financial condition have reached such a critical point that there now exists an immediate and serious danger to the health, safety and welfare of (Eagle Arts’) students,” Fennoy wrote in a letter to school board members.
Board members are expected to vote Wednesday on the proposal for an “immediate termination” of the school’s charter.
Monday afternoon, the school’s executive director, Gregory Blount, told the school parents via email that it would be “difficult” to reopen the school next month and recommended that they enroll their children in other area charter schools.
The move to close Eagle Arts comes after a series of delays thwarted the district’s first attempt to shut it down before the school year begins Aug. 13. As a charter school, Eagle Arts is publicly financed but operated by a private board of directors.
RELATED: Eagle Arts charter school may reopen despite vote to close it
In March, the school district initiated a gradual shutdown process, one that requires 90 days’ notice and allows the school to remain open if it chooses to appeal.
Eagle Arts appealed the decision and then convinced an administrative judge to twice postpone a hearing in the case. The delays ensured that the school would be able to reopen next month before the case is decided.
This month the school district tried instead to end its monthly payments to the school, but the judge in the case last week ordered that the payments continue.
But the school district had another tool in its belt: an immediate shutdown of the school.
Under state law, the district can immediately close a charter school only if it determines that an “immediate and serious danger to the health, safety, or welfare of the charter school’s students exists.”
Eagle Arts can appeal, but under the law it wouldn’t get to stay open while it does so. The school district could take control of the school, but Fennoy recommends shutting it down instead while any appeal process plays out.
If the school board votes Wednesday to immediately close the school, it’s not clear what becomes of a $255,000 payment that the school district withheld from it this month.
An administrative judge ordered the school district to pay the money by the end of last week, but by Monday the district had not released the money, a school official with knowledge of the case told The Palm Beach Post.
It’s also unclear whether the decision to immediately close the school would override the ongoing appeal, or if the administrative judge overseeing the appeal would attempt to block the board’s new move to close it.
Neither Blount nor a school district spokeswoman responded to requests for comment on the case.
Eagle Arts has been in trouble for a long while, and the law protects the charter, even though it is in financial trouble and has no campus. Why close it down just because it is failing?
For years, Blount has faced criticism for his combative management style and for steering hundreds of thousands of dollars in school funding into his personal businesses.
Once one of the county’s largest charter schools, Eagle Arts’ enrollment plummeted in recent years after a series of scandals and frequent staff turnover. By the end of the last school year, enrollment had fallen to about 273 students.
The district has argued that the school must be closed because it is in “deteriorating financial condition,” has not paid rent for its 13-acre campus since September and is spending “excessive” amounts on administrative salaries while its student enrollment falls.
In making its case to immediately close the school, the school district is citing its latest woes as evidence that it is an unsafe environment for children. The owner of the school’s campus filed an eviction action in June, saying that the school owed it more than $700,000 in unpaid rent.
Okay, so the director puts the school’s money into his personal business. Is that a problem? So it hasn’t paid rent? No problem. The director explained that the test scores are low because the students are visual learners, you know, artistic types.
It must not be a “no excuses” school. It has so many excuses. Open the article for lots of links.
Eagle Arts Academy has been a problem for Palm Beach County for a long while. Last April, the school was struggling to pay its staff, yet paying the executive director for the right to use the name of the school and its logo.
Since June, the financially struggling Wellington charter school has paid at least $42,000 to director Gregory Blount’s company for the right to call itself Eagle Arts Academy and use an eagle logo, website and data-processing system that the company owns, school records reviewed by The Palm Beach Post show.
This charade (joke) has been going on for about two years.
Here are the most recent reports, which include the two above.
